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A friend of mine recently sent me this image of a piece of sheet music she had been given. Music

This is music for vibraphone, and she is confused by the notation that appears to be a stretched whole note. So that it looks like a 0 (zero) vertically centered on the staff, just after a bar line.

I have been playing mallets for years now, and I have never encountered this notation before. Does anyone know what it is?

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  • 1
    What meter is this part of the piece in? Does the "0" change the meter or not? – Dekkadeci Sep 8 '17 at 14:17
  • Some more context on the part would help decipher the ntoation – Dean Ransevycz Feb 2 '18 at 2:01
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It could be a note cluster - play A B C or A Bb B C as a whole-note chord (assuming this is in the treble clef). I'm not a percussionist so I don't know how many notes you would normally include in a cluster - but using 4 mallets at once doesn't seem an excessive number!

Ref: https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/tables/note-clusters.html U+E129.

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  • What meter is this part of the piece in? Does the "0" change the meter or not? If the "0" doesn't change the meter and the piece is in 4/4 here, then I question this answer. – Dekkadeci Sep 8 '17 at 14:17
  • @Dekkadeci Obviously you can make guesses which mean the answer might be invalid, but the OP didn't provide any information about the time signature - and FWIW much of the contemporary music I play has no time signatures at all. (That's not a modern invention - a lot lf 16th century music had neither time signatures, nor any "regular" rhythm that could be indicated by barlines). – user19146 Sep 23 '17 at 5:52

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